Immigrants Replenish Irish Ambience of N.Y. Enclave

In Yonkers, at the Aisling Irish Community Center, Orla Kelleher, the executive director, seated, with the new arrivals Denise Gallagher, 20, of County Mayo, center, and Jacquelyne Murray, 27, of County Limerick.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

The Butcher’s Fancy is getting more customers for its Irish sausages and steak-and-kidney pie. The Irish Coffee Shop notices more orders for its slow-cooked Irish oatmeal, brown bread and rashers.

Newly immigrated athletes are beefing up the Gaelic football teams in nearby Riverdale. And Msgr. Edward Barry, pastor of St. Barnabas Church, notices a slightly more bountiful collection plate, thanks partly to new arrivals who, he says, are “a little bit better” about coming to Mass.

Irish immigrants are again settling in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx and the adjacent McLean Avenue neighborhood of Yonkers, giving a lift to an enclave that had been seeing its Irish flavor slip away, much like New York’s other historically Irish strongholds of Inwood, Riverdale and Norwood.

The trickle of newcomers is small and difficult to quantify. Yet the area feels more Irish — the cardboard shamrocks and Gaelic sayings mounted in windows and on doors seeming to be only partly related to the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day on Thursday.

“When you notice all the new arrivals on the street, you feel quite hopeful, and that resonates throughout the community and creates a sense of vibrancy,” said Orla Kelleher, executive director of the Aisling Irish Community Center, a social service agency on McLean Avenue.

As the Irish did off and on for the last 150 years, they are escaping the economic miseries of Ireland in the hopes of finding something better in New York — even if in a battered American economy it is not all that much better.

There are still fewer Irish residents in those neighborhoods than in the late 1990s, when almost half the people there were of Irish descent. Then a surge in Ireland’s economy drew many back “home.”

The American Community Survey taken from 2005 to 2009 found that of the approximately 18,500 residents in seven census tracts in Woodlawn and southeast Yonkers, 40.6 percent claimed Irish ancestry (with 1,850 born in Ireland), down from 45.6 percent in 2000.

“There’s still a good lot of us here, but not as many as there used to be,” said Martina Lavin, owner of Anna’s Attic’s, a McLean Avenue gift shop that sells Irish sweaters and jewelry.

Recently, though, the Irish economy has taken another turn for the worse, and business owners and other residents said they detected a resurgence of Irish lilts.

Siobhan Dennehy, executive director of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center, said there had been an increase this year of 5 to 10 percent in the number of immigrants the agency was helping.

Photo

At the Irish Coffee Shop on McLean Avenue in Yonkers, Geraldine Burke with a customer, John O’Connor.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

“It keeps the neighborhood Irish because they come here to get their Irish products,” said Oliver Charles, owner of the butcher shop, whose brogue hints at his own journey from County Leitrim in Ireland’s north.

Those spurts are good news for neighborhoods that in the 1990s and for much of the last decade lost residents not only to suburbs like Pearl River and Mahopac in New York, but also to an Ireland whose economy, driven by technology and construction, was riding what the Irish called the Celtic Tiger. Then Ireland’s housing bubble burst and a banking crisis erupted. With unemployment in Ireland reaching 13.7 percent last spring, many began to seek work abroad.

Niall O’Dowd, editor of the New York newspaper The Irish Voice, said a thousand people a week leave Ireland behind, with most heading to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, English-speaking lands where immigration laws make settling easier. But about 12 percent, Mr. O’Dowd said, come to the United States, many on 90-day visitor visas that they eventually overstay. Others take up an American citizenship acquired decades before and return to the Bronx-Yonkers neighborhood, he said.

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Jackie Murray, a native of the Bronx, was taken by her parents to County Limerick when she was 4. But at 27 she is back in the Bronx, where she has two uncles, and is hoping to work as a registered nurse. Her husband is working as a carpenter, but after seven months she has been unable to get New York State officials to process the paperwork that corroborates her Irish nursing credentials, and so she is working as a waitress in New Jersey.

Ms. Murray said she was enjoying the cheer at Ned Devine’s on McLean and the Rambling House on Woodlawn’s commercial spine, Katonah Avenue. She frequently stops by the Butcher’s Fancy to buy the bran for Irish soda bread.

“It’s like living in my Irish village,” she said. “I come home and within three blocks there’s a lot of people from my village living in the area.”

Still, she said, she is losing heart and is planning to move to Australia, where she has already been offered a nursing job.

Ms. Kelleher of the Aisling Irish Center said she noticed young Irish men and women, newly arrived, dragging their bags of laundry or looking a little lost on the sidewalks, without that “confident settled look.” Most of them, she said, end up cultivating contacts at local bars or at Gaelic football clubs and find work in a month or two as construction workers or nannies.

These immigrants include people like Damian O’Connor, 25, a carpenter with wheat-colored hair in dreadlocks. He came from Ireland five weeks ago and is living on Katonah Avenue, Woodlawn’s main drag, and looking for construction work.

“I’ll take anything, though I’d like to keep things above board,” Mr. O’Connor said, with a smile.

Some merchants, like Ms. Lavin of Anna’s Attic and John Lyons of McKeon’s Bar and Restaurant, lament that American laws make it exceedingly difficult for immigrants without work visas to find a legal job. Yet, said Ms. Kelleher, who herself emigrated from County Kerry in 2004, Woodlawn is about as close to Ireland as you can find in America.

“Anything you can enjoy at home you can enjoy here,” she said.

Except for the people they left behind.

“The only thing you don’t have is family and friends,” Ms. Kelleher said. “That you have to live without.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 12, 2011, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘It Keeps the Neighborhood Irish’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe